Coetzee says children shun books for TV

8 December 2003 — 11:00am

Novelist J. M. Coetzee, winner of this year's Nobel Literature Prize, believes television has replaced books as a source of imagination for many children.

"I read a great deal as a child," Coetzee said in a rare interview broadcast on Swedish SVT public service television on Friday. "I did have a sense that there was a certain devotion to the book in the family.

"A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that's an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home," he said.

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His own childhood was in the 1940s and 1950s, he noted.

Coetzee, a politically engaged anti-apartheid champion, who emigrated to Australia in 2001, declined to discuss his books, which include Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K.

Coetzee described his own academic career as "haphazard", but said he was now very happy at the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago in the United States where he spends part of each year teaching.

Coetzee writes in English and is fluent in Afrikaans. He said his written language "goes down very well on the page. It doesn't go down so very well in ordinary conversation".

He also revealed a youthful dream of becoming a poet.

"If I had been born 20 or 30 years later, I would probably have ended up studying theoretical linguistics and perhaps artificial intelligence, something of that order, and perhaps have continued with a sideline in poetry in the evenings."

Asked if he might still embark on such a career, Coetzee said: "It is much too late."

He will receive his 10 million crown ($1.3 million) prize together with the medicine, physics, chemistry and economics laureates in Stockholm on December 10.

The Nobel prizes awarded since 1901 were founded in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite.